


lead

by macabre



Series: elemental [6]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Foster Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Parent Tony Stark, Protective Tony Stark, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark-centric, Tony adopts Peter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:29:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26147959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: “Stopped you? Stopped you from what, Peter? What were you planning to do exactly?” Tony wants to shake the kid now. He’s got all kinds of images swimming through his thoughts. “You can’t run around and try to play vigilante!”“Isn’t that what you do? You do it all the time for all kinds of things, but not for - ” Peter cuts himself off, fury still present at the edges of his fists.“But not for you? Is that what you think?”
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: elemental [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1326329
Comments: 29
Kudos: 205





	lead

It’s Thursday morning, right after eleven when he gets the distress call. It’s a simultaneous alarm - the face on the back of his wrist watch vibrates at the same time as his AI’s voice in his ear: “Boss, alert coming in from Peter.”

He doesn’t have to deploy the units for his suit - FRIDAY does it for him and has him booted up in air, already on course to the kid’s coordinates, before Tony has time to look over them himself. Peter should be in school at this moment, but his location shows he’s about four blocks south of the campus. 

His location isn’t moving, but Tony punches the speed to the max hoping beyond hope that he’s going to find his kid with the tracker and not just the tracker by itself. Fortunately, he’s half a mile up in the sky when he spots Peter; he’d recognize that mop of hair anywhere.

The kid is sitting on the pavement in the alley next to the dumpster; Tony is able to land nearby without hopefully notifying the entire neighborhood he’s there. He stumbles out of the suit as it opens and is ready to pat down Peter for injuries, despite the body scan done in air already telling him he’s uninjured, but surprisingly Peter jumps up before he can reach him.

Tony expected evasiveness or injury - he doesn’t expect Peter to be worked up like this. Probably because he’s never seen Peter like this. 

“Mr. Stark!” 

That stops Tony short for a moment; Peter stopped calling him Mr. Stark about five months after moving in, and those five months felt like a triumph when they were over. “Pete, what’s wrong?”

He crashes into Tony, trying to simultaneously hold him at arm’s length but also collapse into hiding in the lining of his blazer. “Mr. Stark, you have to do something!”

It’s like the bucket of cold panic thrown over him is replaced with annoyance; he can’t even justify it. Gritting his teeth, Tony tells himself that Peter is okay. He’s standing right in front of him, bodily in one piece at least. He just needs to be patient, get all the details. He tries to run a hand through Peter’s hair to calm him down, but Peter winces and backs away from him, leaving Tony’s hand lingering in the space between them. 

It stings; this moment stings.

“Peter, take a breath, okay?”

This kid looks on the verge of a breakdown; his hair is sticking up all over the place, evidence of him pulling at it while he waited, and his eyes are bloodshot. He looks pale and scared. He looks even younger today than he did the day Tony met him. His body vibrates with emotion - or is he trembling? He’s in shock, Tony realizes, and he shrugs off his jacket to wrap it around Peter’s shoulders, but the kid skitters out of it and leaves it crumped up on the ground next to a McDonald’s wrapper. 

“No, listen. Listen!” Peter’s eyes jump from one corner of the building in front of him to another. Frantic. Manic. “There’s this guy that lives in this building -”

“Jesus, Pete, what’s this?” Tony catches Peter’s hand for as long as he allows it. His knuckles are scraped up, bleeding sluggishly down his hand and wrist. 

“What? That’s nothing!”

“Did you get in a fight with someone?” 

“No, listen to me, there’s this guy!”

“We need to get this wrapped.”

“Stop!” Peter’s voice is sharper than any physical blow Tony has ever been dealt. He looks furious - not an emotion that Tony has ever really seen from his kid. 

Tony sinks back on the balls of his feet, hands up, to put the space Peter clearly needs between them. There is a brief moment of stillness, an impasse. Tony just needs to know - he needs to know the threat, then he can neutralize the threat. 

Peter takes a breath. “There’s a guy who lives in this building. He’s a pedophile.”

Tony’s heart sinks right into his shoes. Peter’s name is knocked out of the center of his chest. 

“He’s been skeeving on this little girl; I noticed him a few days ago, so I followed him, and I -”

“Wait, how long have you been following him?” He’s been skipping school all week? Why wasn’t he informed? 

“He’s grooming this little girl, and I gotta stop it!” Peter’s voice is creeping up; Tony nervously looks towards the busier street at the end of the alley. 

“Peter.” Tony doesn’t know where to start. “If this has been bothering you, why didn’t you tell me?”

Peter doesn’t answer. He breaks their frantic eye contact to look at his feet. 

“You could have just given me the name of the guy, and I would have taken care of it.”

“I don’t know his name.”

Right. “Still, you could have given me the information you had, like this address.”

Peter shakes his head. “You don’t get it.”

“I know, Pete, I know, but did you stop to think how it would make me feel if I knew you were out there tailing a suspected pedophile?” After everything they’ve been through in the past year? The retrial? 

“This isn’t about you! It’s about that little girl!” Peter explodes, and this time Tony has to stop himself from looking to see if they’ve garnered any attention yet. He needs to move this conversation elsewhere he knows, but Peter is so upset that he’s unsure of how to broach the topic. 

“Peter, you know - ” this time Tony stops himself. Peter knows firsthand how these things have to be handled, but despite everything Tony knows about Peter’s abuse, he avoids unpacking it right now. “This is an extremely delicate matter. It has to be handled in a certain way - we need to get his name and then we can look through the database, alright?”

“And if he’s not in that database, what? You don’t believe me?” His voice has grown softer, but colder. Tony can’t see his eyes, and he wants to pull Peter’s chin up, but he knows better than to touch him right now. 

“Hey, hey. Look at me.” He doesn’t. “You know I believe you, but it doesn’t work like that. I can’t just bust in a random guy’s door without evidence.”

“So what? You’ll just wait? You’ll just wait, and then it will be too late. She’s already started to trust him!”

“Peter, I promise you, it will be investigated, but it can’t be right this second.” He’s got to get himself and Peter out of this alley way, he needs to make some calls, needs to make sure Peter gets a proper meal in him and an afternoon of little stimulation to stop the growing panic and trauma creeping in. 

Peter looks flabbergasted, distraught, and ageless. The words that come out of his mouth should and do sound childish, but it’s no less than he’s heard before: “But you’re Tony Stark! You can handle it now!”

It’s his own teeth grinding that he hears so clearly; it startles even Tony. It startles Peter too, by the looks of it. Tony takes measured breaths in and out, trying to collect his thoughts. In the time being, Peter begins to deflate, wearily eyeing him. He shifts from one side to the other, watching Tony, ready to spring. This entire interaction is out of their normal depth, but Peter can read Tony’s anger well enough. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. He flexes his injured hand in and out. It curls up in the edges of his hoodie - the same hoodie he always has to wear for this exact purpose. 

“Hey. Pete.” Tony tucks his own hands into his pockets to stamp out any other desire to touch and comfort. “I’m not angry with you, okay? I’m angry with maybe everyone else, but not you. You know that, right?”

Nothing.

“Can we go home so I can look into it?” Can they go home so Tony can wrap the kid up in his favorite blanket on the couch where he’ll leave something on with just enough volume that Peter won’t hear any of the said calls?

Peter doesn’t answer. He rocks back and forth on his heels - once, twice, thrice - then stands abruptly. He still won’t meet Tony’s gaze, but at least he’s willing to be steered toward the street where Happy will meet them shortly.

It’s a silent car ride. Not the first, of course, and he’s sure it won’t be the last. Happy can immediately tell something’s up; of course, he would have known regardless with the time of day. Tony has lunch waiting for them by the time they arrive; because he’s a coward, he also calls in back-up.

“Hi, honey.” Pepper gets away with a soft kiss on top of Peter’s head. She looks between him and Tony, stricken. 

Shit. There are tears on the kid’s face now. Maybe asking Pepper to be there was too much at this moment. “Are you hungry at all, Peter? Or do you need a minute?”

Peter doesn’t say anything, predictably. He sways between them, a puppet waiting for engineering. 

Tony steps up closer to him. “Kid. Are you ready to handle this now?”

He can trace the lines of tension working their way up his shoulders, neck, and face. Peter jerks a nod, but he heads for his room. Tony shares a look at Pepper who nods once briefly; she’ll wait. 

Inside Peter’s room, the kid sits on the floor next to his window, just like he did for hours and hours after moving in. Tony is a pro at reading every nuance in emotion through glass reflections - the not quite all there-ness of it, the transparency and lack thereof. 

Peter answers Tony’s questions with a detached voice, the same one used to tell his own experiences to strangers in court. It’s not the same voice he related the experiences to Tony with though, and it hurts to be reduced to someone like a stranger in this moment.

Tony is left with no name, just an address and a description. Peter says the guy is almost always lurking outside the salon close to his school at the same time though; the little girl in question belongs to one of the women who works there and is sometimes left alone to amuse herself. 

The biggest identifier will be the tattoos that Peter has relayed to him; the guy has enough that Tony knows he will find him, but it’s not the first time around. FRIDAY hacks into the list of renters in the building and finds no one to match the description, which means he must be living there with someone without being on the lease. Something like that is enough to warrant a visit from a landlord if nothing else.

When the property management turns up nothing, FRIDAY has to go the route of DMV, which is trickier. Not because it’s hard to get into their files, but because the guy could be from any state and the more lines he has to cross, the more likely it is that someone could trace it back to him in the future. It doesn’t matter - Tony will do it. Because his kid asked. 

Fortunately, there is a short list of potential men it could be from New York and New Jersey. While the tattoos aren’t visible in the DMV photos, Tony can cross reference from any kind of source - social media, police records, medical records. He’s pretty sure he finds the right guy, but he needs Peter to positively ID him to be sure. 

“Yeah. That’s him,” he says, same tone of voice, same position in front of the window. 

Tony leaves to make the phone calls and Pepper sits on the tiniest corner of a chair in Peter’s room, referencing all parts of her week after he fails to be persuaded into conversation. It doesn’t take Tony long to make the calls, but he avoids going back in his kid’s room after. He carries his phone in his hand from room to room, feels how hot the weight in his hand is. 

When he shows his face again, Pepper is standing in the kitchen alone, one lonely light left on. She frowns at him. “I couldn’t get him to eat.”

Tony sighs. “Not surprising.”

“What now?”

“I’ve notified authorities; they’ll deal with it.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Tony softly thuds his head back against a cabinet. “Shit, Pep. I should have known something was up. He’s been acting differently all week.”

“Tony, you’re doing a wonderful job.” A soft touch on his wrist, a wan smile on her lips. “But I’m tapping you in on meal duty. He looks like he needs it, and I know you and Happy patented your own tricks for getting him to eat.”

“Right.”

Right. Tony looks at what Pepper’s prepared for his kid and decides to scrap it in favor of something a little greasier, because hey - what’s comfort food for? Or at least, he knows he can guilt Peter into eating this, because he knows it’s Tony’s favorite, but Tony won’t eat until Peter does, so there. Some great parenting technique. 

By the time he’s walked Pepper out and made their now early dinner, some time has passed. Enough time that he’s now sans a teenager.

“FRIDAY?” Tony stands in the threshold of Peter’s room, but it’s empty. He stands there with two plates of steaming food, the heat from beneath starting to burn his hands. 

He prompts his AI once more, panic creeping in as he quickly throws the plates down along the kitchen island without breaking pace towards his penthouse exterior garden, a space lovingly curated by Peter. The tendrils of ivy tickle his face as he breezes past them, the nano units crawling out of their unit. 

“My apologies, sir, my reboot took longer than expected.”

“A reboot at the same time my kid goes missing? Unlikely.” He mostly whispers to himself, but if FRIDAY wants to say something, she doesn’t. 

“You know where you’re going, boss?”

“Oh, I’ve got a few ideas.”

Except when Tony touches down at the same spot he found Peter previously, it’s all quiet on the street. He’s across the street from the building the guy supposedly lives in, the one Peter pointed out to him. Tony walks the perimeter of the block, eyes darting to every possible stake out location a teen might dream of, but so far, no sign, and the kid of course left both his phone and tracker on his bed, tucked under his pillow. 

“Well, shit.” 

The building has a shitty lock on the front of it, the kind of thing that FRIDAY can bypass easily, but in the few moments she has to work on scrambling it for him, his watch pressed up against the front of it, someone nearly gives him a broken nose when they push open the front. 

“Oh, sorry! Didn’t see you there!” the young woman says brightly before she can even look at who she almost knocked out. She practically skips down the street, but Tony is at least holding an open door now. 

He walks down the first story floor holding his nose, bleary eyes talking in the unit numbers. He stops. It’s quiet in the building, and he’s not sure what to do now. Look level by level?

“FRIDAY, track the guy’s phone. Make sure he’s here.” Tony supposes it doesn’t matter - Peter wouldn’t know if the guy is here or not. Right? God, he hopes Peter hasn’t evolved to that level of hacking yet, although he’s not going to rule it out either if he can orchestrate a reboot for FRIDAY. 

“Confirmed.”

Well, it doesn’t matter. Tony walks the halls of the nine story building and finds no trace of anyone other a kid Peter’s age doing his homework in the privacy of the hallway. He heads back outside so at least the cool night air can relieve the sting of his nose. 

Tony heads back to the original alleyway; he crouches down exactly where Peter sat this morning. He thinks, rubbing at his face, double checking that the kid hasn’t arrived back home yet, even though he knows FRIDAY would have told him already. 

There are other places Peter could be, Tony thinks. He just doesn’t think they’re likely. Doesn’t feel right. 

He waits for awhile, then walks around the corresponding blocks, head ducked down, but the only person who might recognize him so far is a woman outside a bodega who looks too bored to make a fuss. He can feel her eyes tracking him all the way down the street though, and just about as he’s ready to head another block over towards the school, further out than Tony would have originally looked, he hears it. The sound of shuffling feet. Low, indistinct shouting. A low whistling, almost whine like yell. Something that would sound like nothing - background noise even - to another person, but not to a parent. 

“You again?” a rough male voice is barely audible, even in how still this particular night is. Tony is picking up his jog to a full out sprint around the corner - he can tell he’s getting closer, but no visual confirmation yet. “I thought I warned you, kid!”

Tony rounds a corner, and all this is happening in the middle of an intersection, but no one else seems to bat an eye at a middle aged man dragging a scrawny kid by the front of his shirt through the street. Peter is struggling, throwing his weight away from the man, making the low pitched whining noise that he’s usually not conscious of. The guy is actually growling at him - how many times has this guy caught wind of Peter following him?

“Hey! Hands off my kid!” Tony yells, actually stops to point at the guy like a cartoon. The guy stops for a moment, but he certainly doesn’t let go of Peter, who trips over his feet and hangs like a doll from the guy’s fist. 

The guy looks genuinely shocked at Tony’s face - maybe also the nose bleed he’s got going on - and with his attention elsewhere, Peter claws at the guy’s hand holding him, and when that doesn’t work, he bites the guy.

“Shit!” he yells, finally dropping Peter unceremoniously to the ground. In the middle of a busy street in Midtown. Cars start honking, Tony has to dodge around a taxi, and the guy is starting to run for it. Before Tony can get to him, Peter is up and after him.

“Peter! Stop!”

The kid is way quicker than the guy they’re after, but they’ve both got a head start on Tony. He’s across the street, watching the guy climb over a chainlink fence, then his own kid is vaulting up it like it’s nothing. If he wasn’t seeing it with his own eyes, Tony wouldn’t believe Peter could maneuver like that. 

By the time Tony’s got himself over the fence, they’re on the ground, wrestling. He’s not sure who tackled who - he just sees a full grown man on top of his son, and now he really does see red. He’s certainly not gentle when he yanks the guy off Peter, ready to round on the son of a bitch and let him take a swing at someone his own size, but he doesn’t account for having to keep Peter down. 

The kid launches himself after the guy once more, his face full of fury, completely transformed, but Tony catches him around the waist before he can go anywhere. “Peter!”

So much for giving this guy a piece of his mind - he has to link his arms through Peter’s to keep him subdued. They wrestle with each other while the other man just watches, his face melting from anger to confusion. 

“What the fuck, Stark? You trying to get sued for harassment?” The guy quips, pretty cocky for getting thrown by a scrawny teenager. 

Before Tony can say a word, Peter spits at the guy - it’s a thick wad of both saliva and blood, and it lands on the guy’s chest. The guy growls again, but he’s not likely to try anything more in the presence of another adult. 

“I know what you did!” Peter yells. “I know what you did!”

“Peter,” Tony harshly whispers, trying to calm him down. The situation has unspooled so far from his own control that it’s laughable. 

“Your kid’s got a big mouth, Stark. He better watch it.”

“Are you threatening me, or my kid, Mr. Nickels? Either way, it’s not wise.”

The guy spits a wad back, right next to Tony’s shoe. He stews for a minute, his eyes not leaving Tony’s face. “And it’s not wise for someone to accuse someone of something so serious.”

“If it’s not true, then you won’t have anything to worry about, will you?”

He doesn’t say anything for another moment, then quietly: “I’ll fucking see you in court, Stark.”

He slinks off in the dark, and once he’s out of sight, the spell is broken and Tony becomes aware of the struggling kid in his arms. “He’s getting away!” Peter shouts. 

“Hey, Peter, hey.” He tries to be gentle about it at first, then he has to grab Peter’s chin a little more firmly than he would prefer. “Peter, stop. Stop, and look at me.”

He turns his kid in his arms, the fight slowly going out of him. The underside of his chin is scraped up, following the path up one cheek, and he’s clearly bitten his lip hard enough to bleed - doesn’t that one bring back memories. 

Tony gently squeezes a little harder until Peter stops struggling. He still won’t look at him. “Peter, what are you doing?”

“What do you mean? He’s - he’s going to hurt her!”

“Why did you attack him?”

“Attack - I didn’t attack him! He’s been following that little girl.”

“Peter.” Tony lets Peter jerk his chin out of his hold while he tries to gather his thoughts, one hand wrapped fully around Peter’s bicep. He won’t let that go, just in case. “There’s no little girl here. It was just the two of you when I found you. What prompted you to engage with him? Was he - was he trying to hurt someone?”

He can see Peter’s fury forthcoming, ready to spill over in his hand. 

“I mean, was he about to hurt someone that very moment?”

“Well - ” Peter looks around wildly at everything but Tony. “No, but - ”

“You can’t ambush someone like that, Peter. It’s not going to do anything but get you in trouble. You know that.” His good, patient Peter who wouldn’t dare make a noise when he moved in. He would hardly dare move in someone’s vicinity, freezing anytime someone else entered his room. Peter was nothing if not cautious. 

“You don’t get it. You just don’t get it.” When the anger runs out, there’s nothing but fumes and misery. The tears are there, and there’s nothing to stop them washing down Peter’s face.

“I know I don’t, Peter, but I’m trying to do everything I can anyway, okay? I called the cops. They have enough reason to question him, even though he’s not on any offender’s list, okay?”

Peter winces. “Tony…” His lower lip trembles, so he bites it, the bloody part disappearing in his mouth. He sways in a little in his hold, like he might be ready to collapse at any moment, but all of a sudden he straightens up, looks Tony dead in the eye, and with steel in his voice says, “You shouldn’t have stopped me.”

“Stopped you? Stopped you from what, Peter? What were you planning to do exactly?” Tony wants to shake the kid now. He’s got all kinds of images swimming through his thoughts. “You can’t run around and try to play vigilante!”

“Isn’t that what you do? You do it all the time for all kinds of things, but not for - ” Peter cuts himself off, fury still present at the edges of his fists. 

“But not for you? Is that what you think?” It physically hurts Tony to hold Peter at this moment. Peter looks down, and Tony releases him without really meaning to. It doesn’t matter - Peter stays put, falling to his knees where they stand. 

One step forward, two steps back. Peter’s therapist uses the phrase more than once with Tony about the kid’s progress. It’s such a strange moment, an out of body, out of this world experience to think about what’s happened in the past eight hours. He would have never thought Peter would go on a solo manhunt, never thought the kid would instigate any kind of violent confrontation, but here they are. 

“Mr. Stark?” Peter’s voice wobbles from below him. He’s sitting on the ground now, arms folded up around his knees. 

A familiar sight. 

“Hey, no, don’t do that again, okay?” Tony crouches down next to him, the softest touch he can muster on top of Peter’s head. “You’re going to break my heart with all of this Mr. Stark stuff.”

A sniffle. A low whistling breath scrapes by. That whining noise the kid is never aware that he makes. “Tony.” His voice sounds totally wrecked, the emotional transformation overtaking his previous mission. “Tony.”

“Hey, come here,” Tony opens his arms to the kid before he fully is washed away in tears. Peter collapses against him. “I’m so sorry, Pete.”

The tears give way to full on sobbing, then Peter tries to stutter an apology of his own over them. When Tony assures him the apology isn’t necessary, Peter clings tight enough to his front that Tony can scoop him up. He kisses the side of his head and for the second time that day taps his watch to alert Happy to pick them up. 

Peter lies with his head in Tony’s lap on the way home, half asleep. His eyes are barely open, still watery, looking for assurances in his father’s face. Tony brushes a hand through his hair, his palm coming to rest against the backs of Peter’s eyes, forcing them closed. 

I got you.

You can rest. 

Things that need not be spoken, or so Tony hopes so. When they get home, Peter doesn’t protest at the childish way that Tony tucks him into bed and lies next to him. His eyes are half open again, watching every motion. 

“You trust me, right, Pete?”

“Of course I do.” He sounds truly miserable when he says it, not because the sentiment makes him miserable, but Tony knows he feels some remorse for the evening. 

“I’m going to take care of it.” And I’m going to take care of you. 

Peter shuts his eyes; Tony can tell he’s faking sleep, but eventually he has to get up and finish the job. He doesn’t immediately tell Peter the next morning that the guy has been picked up on unrelated charges, but at this moment, he doesn’t think he needs to. Peter nervously hovers close to his side, coming up to him in the lab, fidgeting and pulling his hands down into his hoodie. He chews his bruised lip. 

Tony opens up one arm so that the kid can tuck his way in. Peter stands there and watches Tony turn a new turbine model in his hand. “Why’d you do it this way?” He points at the connection posts, but his eyes are pouring into Tony’s.

“It’s safer this way, kid.”


End file.
